Headwaters
David Antrobus Posted on Friday, January 15, 2016 at 8:17PM 
A story in a single sentence:
Shaky after two days' release from the psych ward, she wants to "put it all behind her," as the genial yet guarded advice had gone, so she takes the Skytrain to go ask about rental costs at a nearby Enterprise office whose bleak geometry squats in a grim patch of stilted highways, loose rubble, and territorial chain link somewhere near where Vancouver borders Burnaby, but she gets cold feet at Renfrew Station, turns around and scurries back to the library near her home on East Pender, where she searches Google Maps and decides Swift Current is the loveliest place name she's ever heard, especially in contrast to that of its province, which is all brittle stalks and wheat sheaf angles (Sask-atch-ew-an), and wants to visit for that reason alone—Swift Current, that is; a name that evokes homecoming sockeye vigorous and sleek as distance runners' quadriceps—although the furthest she's ever driven was Vancouver to Hope, ironically when she'd been at her least hopeful, and even then she'd had a tire blow somewhere near Yarrow, nearly killing her, and the towtruck and repair costs had been so high she'd had to turn back, out by many dollars and by even more self-worth, given all her struggles with what some might call mental health issues yet she chooses to term emotional difficulties, since the former still contains a tiny jab of stigma, and dammit, it's hardly her fault, given her early life with Uncle Giorgio and then those grey-stuccoed group homes and weary, spiteful foster parents, let alone the haunted jaundiced nightscape of the Downtown Eastside and her disaster-recipe life with Gunther, he of the one-part lavish confectionary largesse and two-parts savage fists, but she is free now, aside from the medication she needs to remember, while something about Swift Current calls and calls like babbling headwaters to a downstream eddy, urging her to spawn, to take this step that might mark a new chapter in a thus-far chiefly sorrowful tale, one charged with the possibility of something other than grim nights shivering with cold or dread and warmer nights sleepless with mosquitoes or regret, so she finds somewhere online that calculates the cost of gasoline, which comes to a little over a couple hundred bucks for the three thousand kilometre round trip, and she feels a heartsurge of joy until she sees the carbon footprint she'll be leaving—one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds, to be exact—which sounds so appalling she immediately scratches out this new life at its source—indeed, guilt and eroded morale have long perfected her inner Scratch 'n Lose—erasing the evocative names of Shuswap and Salmon Arm, Golden and Banff, Dead Man's Flats and Medicine Hat from a future that might have held something other than the pitiless tidal ebb of try then turn back, try then turn back, the balance of which has always seemed impossibly, monstrously weighted.
Reader Comments (5)
David, I was a bit afraid to read this piece as I wasn't certain the one sentence structure would work. I should have known you would rock it.
This story and your talent take flight, create a life, coalesce into a masterful telling of the unspoken pain of someone's path. It answers the question 'what happened to her' in the most profound ways.
This deserves to be published, David, actually needs to be read. Please, please get it out in front of people.
It should have been titled 'A Life in a Sentence'. Really loved this Daw.
I thought it might be a bit ambitious or even plain silly. There's a sentence in Ulysses that runs for 4,391 words, which is ten times longer than this! Then again, I'm no James Joyce, lol.
But you guys (Gordon and Jo) have put my mind at rest somewhat. So thanks! :)
This is a total "wow" piece. I love these descriptions: "territorial chain link," and "one-part lavish confectionary largesse and two-parts savage fists." I hope you get this out onto Medium or another site that is for already-published pieces; I agree that it deserves wider distribution!
Thank you so much, Laura. It's odd; this felt like a tough challenge initially, but once I'd begun, it did that thing that sounds so clichéd: it began to write itself!
I didn't know about Medium, but I'll check that out!